To fix the High Altar problem, iPadre would need to make the Altar Ad Orientem only, against the wall. The sanctuary is too small to do it any other way other than what it is now, two Altars: a small Altar of repose and the Main Altar used in both directions. I say there should be only one Altar up against the wall. Trust me it WILL get cramped in Ad Orientem masses, since the servers would kneel on the steps and now the servers will kneel inside the rail I presume. You should look at the pics of what the sanctuary used to look like (they’re on the site in the media section), Fr. Finelli has worked wonders with that sacntuary, all paid for by donations from parishoners and installed brick by brick (or piece of wood by piece of wood?) as people would donate more and more things.

One of the great effects of Summorum Pontificum is that it is no longer reasonable for a diocesan architectural review board to prohibit traditional liturgical design elements such as an altar rail. They can no longer be dismissed as out-of-touch with today’s liturgy. Quite the contrary, it could be argued that not to have one might deny a future pastor his legitimate right to celebrate the EF as optimally intended.

It would be interesting to know if there have been any formal challenges yet to a review board’s denial. After all, it would not be surprising if an architectural review board were not even aware of SP. A situation where a denial was appealed, and then won on the appeal, would set an important precedent.

I recently saw a altar rail newly re-installed in a church at the new pastor’s initiative. (Is there some reason, beyond busywork and busybodies, to have such a thing as a diocesan architectural review board?) I understand the parishioners — who immediately asked the new pastor for some Latin in the Mass upon his arrival in the parish — enthusiastically use it as intended. Winds of long-needed change are blowing all around.

This is a letter I wrote attempting to save a communion rail. The rail was removed.

———————

Fr.XXXXX; 3/10/08

I am writing this letter to ask you to please reconsider the decision to
remove St. Bernard’s communion rail. Although I am not a member of your
parish, many a time I stopped in for a visit on my way to Indiana, the
church was almost always unlocked.
Since our Holy Father gave permission last year for all priest to say the
Ancient Mass, there will now be a need for your rail. A retired priest or a
newly ordained priest who would like to use the 62 Roman Missal could be
assigned to St. Bernard with you. Someone will request The Old Mass for a
funeral or wedding, to be read by a visiting priest. God only knows how
long you will be there six years, twelve years, or six months, life is
short. The next pastor may use the 62 Missal and would need your rail.
I do know there is much interest in the Old Mass over at our seminary,
they are studying Latin, they will be taught how to say The Mass of the
ancient church and the new Mass is now being read in Latin each week. There
are more cassocks, surplices, and amices in our future priest’s wardrobes at
the Athenaeum now, then we have seen in the past thirty years. Some of
these men will need communion rails. Please reconsider.

The fact that the communion railing survived until 2008 tells me all I need to know about the priest in charge of that parish. With the revival of Church tradition and architecture which has only accelerated in recent years, that priest must be a hardened lefty taking one unnecessary, destructive act while he still can. I bet the railing gets restored once he’s gone. In my experience if railings weren’t removed prior to 1990 they generally were safe from such phillistine action.

Glad to see the Altar Rail return in this Church. If not used for Holy Communion it still serves to give definition to the Santuary. How often we just see a carpeted “area” up front but have no real idea where the Santuary begins and ends. It adds visual context to the Sanctuary and when the doors open up it invites us all spiritually in. Often when the time of the Consecration comes I imagine the Sanctuary filling up with an invisible “mist” of the Angels and then Christ, kind of floating about, spilling over the Altar Rails and into the Church. Visually, Altat Rails aid me spiritually because they give defintion to a defined space. Kind of like dry ice flowing over the sides of an opened box. Of course they serve a more meaningful function but this is just one lay person’s imagery since the time of childhood. An imagery is important inside beautiful Church buildings as it lends to the spirituality of the individual. All things Holy. So just one more arguement in favor of them and one that is not taken into account often. How Altar Rails can figure into the imagination and the Holiness and Sacredness of the Sanctuary. When removed my vision is gone.

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An outstanding opportunity to get into Latin and New Testament Greek

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A bit more food for thought…

“Only one sin is nowadays severely punished: the attentive observance of the traditions of our Fathers. For that reason the good ones are thrown out of their places and brought to the desert.”

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“The legalization of the termination of pregnancy is none other than the authorization given to an adult, with the approval of an established law, to take the lives of children yet unborn and thus incapable of defending themselves. It is difficult to imagine a more unjust situation, and it is very difficult to speak of obsession in a matter such as this, where we are dealing with a fundamental imperative of every good conscience — the defense of the right to life of an innocent and defenseless human being.”

- St. John Paul II

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Should the US Bishops have us return to obligatory "meatless Fridays" during the whole year and not just during Lent?

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"One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting."

- C.S. Lewis

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More food for thought:

“I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.”

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2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depositary of the public interests."

Additional Food For Thought

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Food For Thought

“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. . . . Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

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